Elliott flicked him a sharp look. ‘My relationship with Jasmine? I told you – friendship.’
‘Come off it. I saw the way you looked at her, at that party we both went to. It might have been nothing but friendship on her side, but it was more than that with you. You fancied her.’
‘And so did you, brother!’ Jonathan Elliott was on his feet, his face darkening, his nose jutting with anger. ‘Oh yes, I remember you at the party, though I didn’t realize at the time you were a copper. I was amused – another hopeful new boy joining Jasmine’s entourage. How far did you get with her?’
Tait straightened, suddenly conscious of his comparative lack of height. ‘I didn’t bother to pursue her,’ he said stiffly. ‘I had other interests – I was there with a girl-friend.’
‘Oh yes – I noticed her vaguely. She was the one Jasmine took on as her secretary, wasn’t she? A rather dim little piece, I thought.’
Chief Inspector Quantrill’s eyes bulged. ‘The young lady you’re talking about is my daughter!’ he intervened. ‘Are you trying to change the subject, Mr Elliott?’
Tait moved towards the desk, fixing Elliott with an ice-blue stare. ‘And how far did you get with Jasmine Woods? Or was that your trouble – that you’ve wanted her for two or three years and have never been able to get anywhere at all? It must have been very frustrating, living so close to an attractive woman who wasn’t interested in you.’
Elliott sat down abruptly, fiddling with the paper in his typewriter. ‘Don’t fictionalize,’ he snapped. ‘All right, I admired Jasmine. What man wouldn’t? But like you, I didn’t pursue her. I had no need to – I’m very happily married.’
‘To a wife who believes in women’s lib?’
‘Oh yes! Just because – quite rightly, in my opinion – Roz rejects the traditionally subservient wifely role, it doesn’t mean that our marriage is unsatisfactory. Far from it. We’re a partnership. We share our domestic pleasures and we divide our domestic responsibilities, so that both of us get involved and neither of us gets exploited. And that applies to sex, too – exploitation is out. It makes for an ideal form of marriage. I can thoroughly recommend it.’
There was a knock on the door. Elliott shouted an irritable ‘Come in!’ The door opened and an alarmingly advanced pregnancy appeared, topped by a young, small, nervous face. ‘S-sorry to bother you, Jonathan,’ said the girl timidly, twisting her ringless hands, ‘but Vanessa said you had visitors and I wondered if you’d like c-coffee. Or anything.’
Elliott waved her impatiently away. The girl, an obvious subscriber to the tradition of feminine subservience, went. Tait raised his eyebrows.
‘One of my wife’s students,’ explained Elliott. ‘She lives here.’ Tait’s eyebrows stayed up, provocatively. ‘I mean,’ Elliott continued, reddening, ‘she came to live here after – Hell, if I did it at all, it certainly wouldn’t be on my own doorstep!’
Tait indicated silent, offensive disbelief. Elliott began to smoulder.
‘Tell me about yesterday,’ Quantrill suggested hastily. ‘You and your wife went to Jasmine Woods’s house about midday, you said. Was anyone else there?’
Elliott’s reply was sulky. ‘Yes, Gilbert Smith. He’s a friend who does her garden. He was in the kitchen drinking coffee when we arrived, but he drifted off after about ten minutes.’
‘Was he high?’
Elliott looked at the Chief Inspector with wary surprise. ‘You know about him?’
‘We know he smokes cannabis. Does he take any other drugs?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Was he high when you saw him yesterday?’
‘I’m no expert. He’s usually vague, anyway.’
‘Did he say anything about what he intended to do for the rest of the day?’
‘No. He just finished his coffee, said “See you” to Jasmine and wandered away.’
‘Hmm. Was anyone else there, apart from you and your wife?’
‘No.’
‘And did Jasmine Woods say anything about what she intended to do for the rest of the day? Was she expecting any callers? Did she say she was going out?’
‘No.’ Jonathan Elliott began to drum his fingers impatiently on the cover of his typewriter.
‘You left Yeoman’s about half-past one, you said. Did you and your wife leave together?’
The drumming paused. ‘No – Roz left about ten minutes before I did,’ said Elliott slowly.
‘In order to get your lunch ready?’ mocked Tait. ‘But I thought yours was a liberated marriage?’
‘Not to get my lunch. It was a sunny day and she decided that she’d like to walk back. I stayed because there was something I wanted to discuss with Jasmine – a book she’d read that I intend to mention in my programme this week.’
‘I thought you disapproved of her literary opinions,’ said Tait.
‘Of her output, not of her opinions.’
‘And did the fact that you stayed behind to talk to Jasmine Woods cause any difficulties between you and your wife when you got home?’ Quantrill asked.
‘No, why should it?’
‘It’s not the kind of thing my wife would approve of.’
Elliott gave him a thin smile. ‘You must have a very conventional marriage, Chief Inspector.’
Quantrill declined to be provoked. ‘Did you and your wife quarrel over Jasmine Woods yesterday afternoon?’
‘Good God no. We talked about her, yes, but that’s all.’
‘What did you do, after you got home?’ asked Tait. ‘What did you do for the remainder of the day?’
‘Oh – I had some bread and cheese and got on with my work. I was here working until the early hours of this morning. Look, you’re not trying to suggest that I had anything to do with Jasmine’s death, are you? Because I can tell you right away that that’s preposterous!’
‘We’re interested in the fact that as far as we know at the moment, you were the last person to see Jasmine Woods alive.’
‘Sorry, but you’ve got your facts wrong. Just as I was leaving Yeoman’s yesterday, another car drove up.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you say so earlier?’ Tait snapped. ‘Can you describe it?’
‘A dark blue Volvo Estate with an S registration. A local car – I’ve seen it around Thirling.’
‘Do you know who it belongs to?’ the sergeant demanded. ‘Who was the driver?’
Jonathan Elliott’s long nose seemed to twitch with satisfaction. He bent over his typewriter, tapping it at practised speed with one finger of each hand. ‘How should I know? You’re the detective.’
‘I’ll do him for wasting police time,’ snarled Tait, ‘if for nothing else. He must know damn well who that car belongs to.’
‘He also knows we can have it traced through the computer,’ said Quantrill. ‘You gave the man a fair amount of aggro, so I’m not surprised he didn’t feel co-operative.’
The two policemen were sitting in Tait’s car just outside the gates of the Old Rectory, waiting for information about the Volvo estate. ‘Elliott’s a possible, quite definitely,’ Tait asserted. ‘What about that row he had with his wife over Jasmine?’
‘We’ve got no proof of that. Oh, I know his son said that he heard a row going on, but children always magnify things. Alison used to get quite upset, when she was small, if she heard me having an argument with her mother. She always assumed that we were quarrelling, but most of the time we weren’t – it was simply our way of coming to domestic decisions. So I wouldn’t give much weight to what the boy said.’
‘But his sister was definitely trying to cover something up.’
‘Girls are like that,’ stated Quantrill with authority. ‘They’re secretive by nature.’
Tait felt ill-equipped to dispute the matter. He was irritated. Everyone seemed to be trying to put him down. When his radio bleeped he answered it sharply.
There were two pieces of information for them. First, a preliminary post-mortem report confirmed Tait
’s hypothesis that Jasmine Woods had died the previous day. The pathologist estimated the time of death to be between eight and nine in the evening. Secondly, Gilbert Smith had gone where Tait had guessed. His motor cycle had been found abandoned on waste ground in Yarchester.
Chief Inspector Quantrill looked at his sergeant with wry approval. ‘There had to be some good reason why they picked you for accelerated promotion,’ he admitted.
Tait grinned, restored to humour. ‘Makes yer spit, don’t it?’ he said immodestly.
The radio bleeped again. A dark blue ‘S’Volvo Estate car was registered in the name of George Eustace Hussey, of the Antique Shop, The Street, Thirling.
Chapter Sixteen
Dressed, but still in her bedroom because she wanted to be alone, Alison sat staring at a bowl of lukewarm mushroom soup. She had not wanted any supper – certainly not the liver and bacon that her mother had proposed – but had agreed to soup for the sake of peace. Now, the smell of it nauseated her; and the greyness, the black-flecked greyness, reminded her of a greyness she had seen earlier that day, a puddle of it that had oozed through the white and red splinters of Jasmine’s skull—
She managed to reach the bathroom without either vomiting or fainting, and clung dizzily to the washbasin. The hollow-eyed face that stared back at her from the mirror, swinging in and out of focus, seemed completely strange. She had sometimes, during the emotional upheaval of her love affair in London, looked at a mirror with amazement that so deep an unhappiness could leave so little trace on her features; now, she knew that her hurt over Gavin Jackson had been comparatively superficial. Her discovery of Jasmine Woods’s mutilated body was traumatic. It had changed her, and the change was reflected in her face.
In the two months since she had left London, she had almost forgotten Gavin. There had, after all, been nothing particularly wonderful about him: he was good looking and amusing and occasionally kind, but more often casual and inconsiderate. She had told Jasmine about him, soon after she began work at Yeoman’s, and when Jasmine said, ‘He does sound a bit of a pig – I recognize the breed, I’ve met one or two like him. You know, I suspect that it’s your pride that has been dented, as much as your heart,’ she had been obliged in honesty to agree.
‘You’re an attractive girl,’ Jasmine had added, ‘and there’s no doubt that someone else will be after you quickly enough. You probably feel at the moment that you can never fall in love again, but you will, of course. Only don’t for heaven’s sake make the same mistake; don’t undervalue yourself by going for another Gavin. There are alternatives, you know.’ And she had smiled encouragingly: ‘That’s what’s so interesting about life – it really does have infinite possibilities for change.’
But not any more, for Jasmine.
It was incredible. Impossible to believe that Jasmine was dead, when her face was so familiar, her voice so clear in Alison’s head. That was one of the horrors: the fact that she had spent an hour in the office at Yeoman’s that morning busily audio-typing, transcribing the tapes that Jasmine had recorded during the weekend, while her friend’s body lay in the next room, bludgeoned and violated.
And what exacerbated Alison’s pain was the memory of the chattiness of the tapes. Jasmine Woods – probably because she lived alone – thought aloud. The tapes were a personal communication between herself and her secretary, a friendly acknowledgement of their dual involvement in the production of the next romantic thriller; they provided an occasional giggle in the middle of the serious business of keeping the Jasmine Woods industry going.
‘Right, then,’ that morning’s tape had begun briskly, ‘Chapter Six in the Paris-in-the-late-1930s saga. I’ve been going through the last chapter you typed, and I’m not happy about the cliffhanger – on reflection, our heroine’s new predicament is even more unlikely than usual. I mean, she’d have known perfectly well that she was walking into a trap – she couldn’t be that stupid … or could she? Hmm. Trouble is, in this genre, if our heroines used their heads they’d never get involved in the first place, and we’d have no plots at all. Anyway, I’ve altered the ending of the last chapter slightly, so don’t be surprised by the apparent inconsistencies. Here we go with Chapter Six: It was a cold and draughty prison, noisy with the wind that moaned through slatted openings in the thick walls. The sun had already set, and the dusk in the chamber was further darkened by a monstrous, unidentifiable bulk that loomed over the wooden floor where Hannah had fallen. She put out – Help, did I say Hannah? Sorry, that was the girl in the last book! Anyway, you know who I mean: Laurel. She put out a tentative hand to touch its side. It was cold as iron. It was iron. “Was” underlined, paragraph.
‘Her fingers slid down a great outward curve and then reached a thick rim. She stood up cautiously and tried to measure its extent, first with her hands and then with her outstretched arms. It was huge, of incalculable size. And yet, incredibly, as she pushed at it, it seemed to move a fraction. Then as her eyes became accustomed to the gathering gloom, she saw the shape of a great bell semicolon. A massive mouth, x tons – see if you can look this one up for me, Ali dear, I’ve no idea what a church bell weighs. I agree that Laurel wouldn’t know either, but I like to get the details more or less right. Credibility wherever possible, that’s my motto. And I’d like to be alliterative if I can, two tons or ten tons or whatever. Where was I? X tons of suspended metal that would soon, as it did every evening, begin to swing in its cradle and bawl out across the rooftops of Paris. She realized with mounting terror that she had been locked in the bell tower of the cathedral of Notre Dame.
‘And Lord knows how I’m going to get her out without a faithful Quasimodo lurking near, but no doubt our hero – hell, there’s someone at the back door. It’s only ten to twelve. Roz and Jonathan are coming for drinks but I didn’t expect them as early as this. Oh well, don’t go away Ali, I’ll get back to you after they’ve gone.’
Alison could hear it again, word for word, with every nuance clear: the wry amusement of the asides, the serious competence of the narrative, the easy affection of the ‘Ali dear’. And it was at that point that she had switched off the recorder to put a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter, checked her watch and decided that it was time Jasmine appeared with coffee.
She had waited a few minutes longer, pondering the best source of information about the approximate weight of one of the Notre Dame bells – the Dean’s office at Yarchester Cathedral? the Encyclopaedia Britannica at the county library? the French tourist office in London? – and had then realized how quiet Yeoman’s was. Too quiet. She had hurried to the hall, called Jasmine’s name, then opened the sitting-room door. At first it was gloomy because the curtains were still drawn, and that in itself surprised and alarmed her. She had pulled them back, flooding the room with April morning sunshine of the kind that is too brilliant to last the day; she had turned from the window and then she saw …
What she had seen was etched on her mind’s eye, engraved as though with acid. Every detail was so appallingly vivid that she could cope with it only by trying to shut it out of her consciousness. The policewoman, Beth Knowles, had asked her for details; had suggested that she might remember more when she got over the shock. But that was naïve. Alison could remember it all, now. She doubted that she would ever forget it. Her problem was to keep it away, to keep a shutter pulled down over it.
But it kept coming back. If she left her mind unguarded even for a moment, the shutter would fly up; once again she would turn from the window to look at the room, lit up like a stage set. Something was wrong, she had known that at once, even though from where she stood she could not see the alcove that contained the wrenched-open display cabinet, or the sofa behind which—
Something had been wrong with the room. Jasmine had invited her to stay for supper on several occasions, and they had usually had the meal in the sitting-room – an omelette or a salad, with a glass of wine, eaten from trays on their knees while they listened to records or talked about every s
ubject that came into their heads. And so Alison knew the room quite well.
Because she was a working woman, a best-selling author preoccupied with writing and proof-reading and business correspondence and accounts and fan mail, Jasmine Woods had no time to spend on rearranging her sitting-room; things were always kept in the same place. And because Alison always sat in the same armchair, close to the window from which she had turned that morning, the roomscape was almost as familiar to her as that of her own bedroom.
And there had been something wrong with Alison’s bedroom. She had known it the first morning after she returned from London, sitting up in bed and looking with sad adult eyes at the relics of her childhood and adolescence that decorated the room. Each of her possessions lived in its particular place, and when she left home she had instructed her mother that nothing must be changed. But Molly had accidentally broken something while she was dusting the room ready for her daughter’s return, and had not thought it worth a confession.
It was not that Alison cared greatly, when she noticed her loss, because she had already decided to send most of the things to a children’s home and to redecorate her room; but she did not fail to notice. Ridiculous that among so many fubsy animals in wool and felt and fur and wood and glass she should spot the absence of one small pink china rabbit …
Something, she knew – apart from the treasures in the cabinet – was missing from its accustomed place in Jasmine Woods’s sitting-room. If she thought about it, she knew that she would remember what it was. But thinking about it – about the room, about Jasmine – was precisely what she did not want to do.
Perhaps the missing object was significant; no doubt WPC Knowles would have been glad to have some information, however marginal, to pass on to the Chief Inspector. Perhaps it would help her father to find Jasmine’s killer.
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